The Geography of Towns

Arthur E. Smailes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351482196
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

When first released much praise was given to this book: "An outstanding book on urban geography. . . representative of the best on this subject."--Higher Education Journal

"The book ought to be required reading for every planner and student of planning . . . a magnificent achievement." --Town and Country Planning.

The Geography of Towns provides a concise but thorough introduction to the important subject of urban geography. It traces the development of urban areas from the earliest sites of Nineveh, Aleppo, and Agade to modern megalopolises and strip cities, and deals authoritatively with problems of classification and ranking, location and type, origins, and course of development, and the relationship of the city to its region and nation.

All facets of urban geography are covered, including the core, integuments, population structure, land-use patterns, enclaves, and town structure. Population mobility and the continual crisscross circulation of populations within and between town and region are seen as important forces affecting the internal geography of towns. The author questions the usefulness or validity of such terms as "neighborhood" and stresses the need for more meaningful conceptualizations and vocabulary.

One of the fundamental problems connected with urban geography is to assist in the planning of future cities. This book contributes substantially to an understanding of the interrelations of town and region and to an understanding of the components of the city itself which are essential to intelligent planning for the future.

1

THE ORIGIN AND BASES OF TOWNS

I. OLDEN TOWNS

It is an old saying that cities are as ancient as civilisation, yet the etymological kinship expresses a depth of truth that is not always fully appreciated. The rise of civilisation has been intimately bound up with the gathering of men to live in cities because the two phenomena have a common geographical basis. From the relations between human societies and the land upon which they are settled city and civilisation require the emergence of certain common conditions without which neither can exist. Urban communities can be supported only when the material foundations of life are such as to yield a surplus of food over and above the consuming needs of the food-producers, and when the means are also available to concentrate this surplus at particular spots. Equally, unless society has reached this stage, the opportunities for that accumulation of knowledge and transmission of experience which is civilisation remain extremely limited. In the absence of trained specialist classes whose business it is to develop and pass on the social tradition, progress can only be slow and restricted, and must always be precarious.

For most of the time man has existed as a species, the energies of almost the whole human race have been claimed in providing the minimum of food, clothes and shelter. Every man who devoted his time to buying and selling or to any profession, whether military or civil, was a man less to work in getting food, and primitive societies, almost wholly preoccupied in toiling for the bare necessities of life, can afford few such. The professions only become possible as each man working on the land becomes able to grow more food than his family needs. Thus it is no mere accident that in human history the invention of writing and the appearance of city life are twin features that date from the fourth millennium B.C. Cities ever since have been the chief repositories of social tradition, the points of contact between cultures, and the fountainheads of inspiration.

Cities flowered first in the Middle-East in the countries that are now Egypt, Iraq and Pakistan. Their appearance was accompanied by great advances in human knowledge and technical equipment. Especially noteworthy among these were a greatly extended use of metals, the invention of the sail, the application of the wheel to transport and more locally to the making of pottery, the invention of the plough and the domestication of animals for draught purposes. Significantly, these were developments which either made possible a great increase in production or facilitated transport. The emergence of urban groups and the new organisation of society involved were so closely connected with these other manifestations of a quickened tempo of cultural progress that we are justified in characterising this phase of human history as an urban revolution. As will be seen later, it was in fact the first of two transformations of comparable significance in the development of human society that warrant this designation.

The scenes of this first urban revolution were areas of irrigation agriculture established in the lower valley of the Nile, in the delta lands at the head of the Persian Gulf, and in the plains of the Indus. In these early homes of settled life, based upon grain cultivation, the farmers, by availing themselves of the regular seasonal river-floods and by developing the use of the plough, were able to raise food-production to a capacity hitherto unknown. For the first time there appeared a sufficient increment to support considerable numbers of people who were not food-producers. Classes were freed to perform for society specialised functions which the newly acquired techniques not only made possible but even demanded for their full application. They gathered in clusters to organise and discharge these special services, and thus there arose towns such as Aphroditopolis and Hierakonpolis in the Nile valley, and Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, 400 miles apart in the plains of the Indus. Early manifestations of urban life, however, were especially notable in the alluvial plains near the head of the Persian Gulf. Here were Susa in Elem and the cities of Sumer (Ur, Lagash, Erech and others), situated among the former distributaries of the Euphrates. Farther inland, near the site of the later Babylon, was Kish.

Fig 1 Some ancient cities of the Middle-East

When, considerably later it would seem, towns such as Anyang first appeared in China it was with an essentially similar basis, the increment yielded by irrigation agriculture in the fertile riverine lands of the Hwang-ho. And when the archaeological record first discloses civilisation established in the New World, the same association is again apparent. Urban life is supported by a surplus provided by developed agriculture. Lacking such advantages for intensive food-production as were possessed by the irrigators of the Old World, the civilisation of the Mayas which flourished during the first millennium a.d. depended upon maize cultivation. Its earliest seats were the cities of the Old Empire in Guatemala, such as Copan, Quirigua and Palenque. The abandonment of these cities and the surrounding agricultural areas, with migration northwards into the Yucatan peninsula, where new cities were set up at Mayapan, Uxmal and Chichen, may well have been due to pressure of population overtaxing the soil resources of the earlier lands.

By concentrating the local surplus produced by intensive agriculture the earliest towns were supported. As compared with anything that had gone before, they were settlements distinctive in size, function and appearance. Their inhabitants had created a new type of environment where they pursued a distinctively urban way of life. It was intensely social, highly articulated, and artificial in the sense of being separated from such immediate and constant contact with the soil and the elements. Yet it is important to realise how local was the basis of these earliest urban centres. Each had its surrounding territory upon which it depended for its maintenance. Although the cities, by their very nature, were specialised communities in which division of labour was carried far, many citizens were at least part-time farmers who cultivated the nearby fields. As concentrated groups of settlement the cities were of a size that surpassed anything earlier, but by modern standards their populations must have been small, and their relation with the immediately surrounding countryside was intimate and direct. They were sustained by it. Evidence revealed by excavation of town-sites in Mesopotamia and Pakistan suggests that the population of Sumerian cities may have ranged from 7,000 to 20,000 and that Harappa and Mohenjo-daro approximated to the higher figure. In the absence of thorough excavation of the Egyptian, Chinese and Maya city sites, we can only infer similar figures.

Earlier types of production had been too inefficient to yield a surplus or too diffused for it to be possible effectively to concentrate the individual surpluses of many small producers. Moreover, the first urban groups were restricted in distribution by the localised occurrence of the geographical conditions that made them possible. Before the days of deep ploughing with an iron-shod ploughshare it was beyond the capacity of the climate and soils of northern Europe to provide such a surplus. Only the greater yield of crops in a reliable climate of heat and sunshine, by irrigation systems that permitted cropping year after year on areas within reach of the floodwaters and their replenishing silt, enabled the small areas within range of supply to the earliest cities to support concentrations of population as large as they did. A like population density was unattainable elsewhere, as it still is today in those parts of the world where primitive economies of hunting, gathering, pastoralism or shifting cultivation prevail. Furthermore, in the riverine lands of the ancient civilisations physical concentration of the surplus was facilitated by the use of water transport on the rivers.

The enlarged territorial scope was reflected politically in the efforts made to unify large areas in Egypt and Mesopotamia, where the first empires made their appearance. In the assertion of primacy by successive cities, with subordination of the others and some measure of fusing of their spheres of influence into an empire, may be discerned the beginnings of an urban hierarchy. The empire of Akkad (Agade) which Sargon established after 2752 B.C. and the Babylonian empire of Hammurabi at the close of the third millennium B.C. extended unified organisation over the whole of the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates. In consequence the tribute drawn to the political capitals from the much extended area supported considerably larger urban concentrations. Even so, much later than this, in the sixth century B.C., the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar's empire at the time of the Jewish captivity is estimated to have had a population of not more than eighty thousand. Yet it was probably the most populous city of ancient Mesopotamia. Nineveh, which it superseded, encompassed a larger area (1,400 acres) but was much less built up. We cannot take literally the population figure of more than 120,000 suggested in the Book of Jonah, where Nineveh is described in terms which exaggerate its population as they obviously do its extent. Thebes, biggest capital of the dynastic periods in Egypt, also occupied a large area that was far from being built up. Much semi-rural country was interspersed with the main nuclei, at modern Karnak and Luxor. The figure of 80,000 with which we have credited Babylon far surpasses anything known from archaeological evidence about other cities.

Considerably later than the earliest cities, which were the products of the local increment of concentrated and intensive agricultural activity, trading towns began to appear. They were secondary outgrowths, acquiring their wealth from the services their people rendered as seekers and suppliers to the ancient civilisations of commodities that were either rare luxuries or necessities, such as metals, highly localised in their geographical occurrence. They depended upon the exploitation of the advantages of situations geographically favoured for developing trade relations.

As early as 2000 B.C., before the Bronze Age, Phylakopi, on the island of Milos in the Aegean, had become a centre of the obsidian trade derived from that island, and on the Levant coast Byblos grew up to supply the timber needs of Egypt from its hinterland in the Lebanon. The second Hissarlik, most long-lived of the cities that successively occupied the site later known as Troy, exploited the situation commanding the Dardanelles. In the search for minerals it developed far-reaching trade connections in central Europe. The cities, notably Knossos and Phaistos, that were the seats of the Minoan civilisation which flourished in Crete during the first half of the second millennium B.C. likewise derived their wealth from maritime trade, especially that of Egypt. They were in turn succeeded in the sixteenth century B.C. by others on the mainland of Greece, Tiryns and Mycenae. On the Levant coast, with Byblos as their precursor, the Phoenician cities Tyre, Sidon and Ugarit grew as trading communities, sustained by the needs of the imperial powers which successively established themselves in the Levant and whose overlordship the Phoenicians recognised.

Thus cities appeared on the islands and in the coastlands of the Mediterranean, where the fragmentation of the cultivated land set very exacting limits to the size of population group that could be supported by the local resources. They were communities which included traders and craftsmen engaged in supplying the chief markets of the ancient world, exploiting their intermediate position for that purpose. The trade they carried on, however, was not a trade in staple foods and they themselves depended upon local hinterlands for their food requirements, so that their distribution was clearly related to pockets of lowland between mountains and sea.

The limitations upon land-transport in ancient times largely confined the role of trading city to nodes that could be reached by ships. Caravan cities were a special class, and were not numerous. The relations of the Phoenician cities with the populous areas of the ancient Middle-East on their landward side were through the cities of the desert margins, such as Aleppo and Damascus, and oasis islands such as Tadmur (Roman Palmyra). These caravan cities were the ports of the desert, served by its ships the camel caravans. Like the trading communities in the coastal lowlands of the Mediterranean their wealth derived from trade, but they originated from and were sustained by local tracts of fertile cultivated land. Damascus, seventy miles inland from the Mediterranean beyond the mountains, was the urban centre of the Ghuta, a fertile plain about 150 square miles in extent, formed by the coalescing alluvial fans of rivers as they emerged from the mountains.

Port sites abounded in the Mediterranean world of islands and peninsulas, but urban growth was circumscribed by the scant resources of the land upon which the trading towns so largely depended for their food. Specialised agriculture and bulk trade in grain did not become important until classical times. When the population outgrew its local food supply a new community hived oif and established itself across the sea. This happened again and again in the restricted patches of agricultural lowland set amidst the stony wilderness of broken highland which hemmed them in on the landward side and came right to the coast as bounding headlands. From time to time the appearance of military conquerors undoubtedly caused groups of traders from Greek cities, as from those of Crete earlier, to migrate as refugees to new centres where they could pursue their vocations freely. Even so, Greek colonisation during its most active period, the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., was agricultural rather than commercial in motive. It arose from the local overpopulation in the limited tracts of agricultural land. The same is probably true of Phoenician colonisation and maybe of the Etruscan migration which brought a people from Asia Minor to found cities in the north-west of peninsular Italy about the eighth century B.C. In due course city life was propagated in this fashion from the Aegean into the coast-lands of Asia Minor, westwards into Sicily and southern Italy, North Africa and even into the western basin of the Mediterranean, where Lacydon (Marseilles) was established about 600 B.C. From Miletus alone it is known that more than eighty separate colonies went out.

An urban nucleus was an essential feature of the Greek state. It was contained in but was by no means co-terminous with the city as conceived in classical Greece. Failure to distinguish the two is partly responsible for some of the current misconceptions regarding the size of urban groups in classical times. Such evidence as there is concerning the population of classical Athens points to a citizen population of about 20,000, of whom about three-quarters were peasants living on the land in the lowlands of Attica. These comprised an aggregate area of about one hundred and twenty square miles of agricultural land, divided among four plains. In addition to Athens, the market and centre of political life, a concentration of trade and industry existed four to five miles away at its port, the Piraeus. Even if we allow for the presence of a large number of foreign merchants (pieties) who are believed to have been nearly half as numerous as the citizens, and of slaves, estimates of whose numbers have been put as high as half the total population, we still have a figure of only 60,000 to 70,000 people for the city state, including rural as well as urban residents. Whatever reasonable allowance we make for these very rough estimates being understatements, others that have assumed the population of classical Athens to have been as great as half a million can only be treated as fantastic. Even the modest figure that has been suggested above was only possible by reliance upon imported supplies of grain, and it was the stranglehold of blockade, cutting off these essential supplies of grain from the Black Sea, that brought Athens to her knees in 405 B.C.

That some of the Greek cities, notably Athens, were able in classical times to outgrow their limited local food-supplies, has often been attributed to a further extension of economic specialisation by which the necessary imports were paid for not only by trade services, but by the export of manufactures. Miletus became famous for woollen textiles and Corinth too was renowned for manufactured products. Although Athens' export trade first became important for primary products, oil and wine, arising from agricultural specialisation, the products of the Laurion silver-mines and of the workshops of the Piraeus, turning out pottery and metal-goods by slave labour, also became important later. Some authorities, however, believe that the industrial basis of the Greek city state has been exaggerated. They prefer to attribute urban growth in classical Greece to the assertion by the city states of their sea-power, through plunder and systematic exploitation of overseas dependencies. Whether or not the organisation of large-scale trade in corn, which was the decisive factor making possible expansion of urban communities in the Mediterranean setting, was essentially a product of political imperialism from its first appearance in the fifth and fourth century Greek city states, it certainly was so in the Hellenistic and Roman empires that followed.

Thanks to the efficiency of its élite as soldiers and administrators, Rome became a city on a new scale of size and magnificence. From small beginnings when it depended upon the local agricultural surplus yielded by peasant farmers in the small mountain-girt and hill-studded plains of Latium, the field upon which it drew for its food-supply was extended by political aggrandisement. The Empire became organised to pay tribute to Rome; its surplus production was demanded not only to maintain a large standing army and bureaucracy throughout the conquered territories but also to provide bread and circuses for an idle populace at Rome. The vast size of the area under unified political control, knit together by roads that were extensions of shipping routes, was reflected in the size of the urban concentration which was its nerve-centre. There is little trustworthy evidence to enable us to offer a figure for the population of imperial Rome, but, as for Athens and Byzantium, some of the high figures that have been suggested are quite improbable, and half a million may be an exaggeration.

In a way that the political organisation of classical Greece had not permitted, the empire of Alexander the Great and still more that of Rome opened up opportunities for trade and new fields for extension of city life. Following the conquests of Alexander, cities were founded in the Middle-East as colonies of officials, traders and retired soldiers. This process was continued and carried farther afield, especially in Europe to the west and north, by Rome, whose organisation of conquered territories was essentially municipal.

Outside Rome itself, the greatest among the trading centres that flourished under the pax Romana was Alexandria. Once the foci of civilisations had shifted to the Mediterranean it was natural that an important urban centre should arise in the Nile delta. This development was foreshadowed by Naucratis, a Greek colony of Miletus founded about 650 b.c. , but it was Alexander who created the city that bears his name, and in the Roman world Alexandria, served by a great system of waterways, concentrated the corn traffic from Egypt, whose fertile lands became the chief granary of Rome. Although essentially a port and owning its greatness to that fact, Alexandria was much more than a community of traders. As the administrative centre of the province of Egypt and second city of the Empire, urban life manifested itself in many aspects. Alexandria was a great centre of culture and learning, and of manufacture, as well as of trade and administration.

Much more specialised were port-towns such as Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, where the corn-fleets were received for Rome, Puteoli (near Naples) whither iron-ore was shipped from Elba for manufacture, Carthago Nuova the outlet for the great silver-lead mines of south-east Spain, and Myos Hermos, Arsinoe (Suez) and Berenice, the Red Sea ports of the eastern tra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Maps
• 1 The origin and bases of towns: I. Olden towns
• 2 The origin and bases of towns: II. Modern towns
• 3 The setting of towns
• 4 Towns and cultures
• 5 The morphology of towns: I. Urban regions
• 6 The morphology of towns: II. The development of the town structure
• 7 Town and region: the urban field
• Note on reading
• Index